“I Belong to the Beat Generation”
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Bent Sørensen, Aalborg University


Oulu, April 25 -28, 2005

This course aims to introduce students to the texts and thoughts of the so-called Beat Generation writers of the 1950s. The texts will be contextualised in various ways to further allow students to explore the cultural, aesthetic and intellectual climate of contemporary North America and Europe, as well as later reception of these authors and their works.

These contexts will include:

Beats and race
Beats and gender
Beats and the avantgarde
Beats and Bohemians
Beats and exile
Beat and Buddhism
Beat cross-aesthetics: music, film and painting
Beat poetics
Beat and auto-biography
Beat and sexual politics
Beat and counter-culture

We will read (excerpts from) some of the core-texts of the Beat canon.
The texts can all be found in one of the several Beat lit. readers on the market:

The Viking Portable Library Beat Reader (ed. Ann Charters) (VPLBR)

Other good readers include:

Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation (ed. Carole Tonkinson)
The Beat Book (ed. Anne Waldman)

Recommended background:

W.T. Lhamon, Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style In the American 1950s
Steven Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels and Hipsters, 1944-1960

Course plan:

1.

 Acts of naming
Beat poetics
  Kerouac: On the Road 		Labels and etymologies
Spontaneous prose?
  Madness and culture heroes
 VPLBR, pp. xv-xxxvi: Introduction
VPLBR, pp. 57-59: Poetics
VPLBR, pp. 10-43: On the Road, Pt. 1, ch. 1; Pt. 3, ch. 9-11; Pt. 4, ch.6
2.
 Allen Ginsberg: Howl, etc.
 Madness, sexuality, politics and influences
 VPLBR, pp. 62-77: Howl a. o. poems
VPLBR, pp. 544-548: Wichita Vortex Sutra
3.
 William Burroughs: Junkie
& The Naked Lunch		 Drugs, sexuality, power and experimental literature
VPLBR, pp. 104-116: Junkie
VPLBR, pp. 126-144: The Naked Lunch
4. Gary Snyder: Rip Rap, etc.
  Kerouac: Dharma Bums		 Bhuddism, nature and mind
 VPLBR, pp. 289-306: Poems etc.
VPLBR, pp. 47-53: Dharma Bums

Resources:
Background articles: 'The Beat Generation' by Bent Sørensen; 'Paradise Lost' - a thematic analysis of On the Road by Bent Sørensen; ' An On and Off Beat: Kerouac's Beat Etymologies' - an article from Philament by Bent Sørensen
Powerpoint presentations by Bent Sørensen: Kerouac; Whitman as background for Ginsberg
Agendas for analysis and essay questions by Bent Sørensen: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Snyder
Images: Kerouac
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Literary Kicks website: Articles on Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Snyder
Academy of American Poets: Ginsberg, Snyder
Modern American Poetry website at University of Illinois: Ginsberg, Snyder
Snyder resources collected at Bent Sørensen's Writing California site
Contact:
Bent Sørensen's Homepage


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